Up until the liberal revolutions of the 18th/19th centuries, permanent global trade war was kinda the norm. People in different countries still bought and sold things to each other, but on an enormously smaller scale than today (even taking into account far smaller population sizes and difficulties in transportation).

Before capitalism became the dominant economic model for pretty much the entire planet, the standard economic model was some form of mercantilism. This is an economic system by which every country tries to maximize exports and minimize imports. The idea was that each country tried to be as wholly self-sufficient as possible. To this end, countries put all kinds of barriers in place of international trade. In many instances, if a product was produced domestically, it was illegal to import it at all, for any price. In other cases there were extremely high tariffs (like several hundred percent) of imported goods. Countries would even go so far as to try to poach industries from other countries. New technologies which made industry cheaper or more efficient were guarded as state secrets. Everyone was always trying to limit the amount of international trade wherever possible. As European colonial imperialism got rolling, the standard was that each colony could ONLY trade with the metropole (home country in Europe). So, to give an American example, the Virginia colony was not allowed to directly trade with the Massachusetts colony, even though both were owned by England. If someone in Massachusetts wanted to buy a product produced in Virginia, that product would have to first be shipped back to England, then to Massachusetts, paying tariffs and duties each way. And if someone in Virginia wanted to trade with someone in, say, Spanish Florida or French Canada, that was strictly illegal under English, Spanish, and French law.

Today the dominant model is that each country focuses on the industries that they do exceptionally well at (the larger a country’s economy is, the more industries they tend to focus on), while minimizing or even neglecting industries which they don’t do well at. For example, a lot of poorer countries might focus on low-skilled manufacturing and agriculture while wealthier countries might focus on higher end manufacturing and services (and a lot of this is driven by the national self-interest of wealthy nations through economic imperialist institutions like the IMF and World Bank). The idea being, I do what I’m good at and sell that to the world while I buy what I’m bad at from people who are better at it.

To this end, the idea of free trade became very important to international politics over the 18th and 19th centuries. This is the idea that there should be a few artificial barriers (read "regulations and taxes/tariffs) on trade as possible in order to facilitate the most efficient economic system as possible. Wealthy European imperialist powers began to recognize that they could get raw resources (food, minerals, etc) from colonized places far cheaper than they could be produced in Europe. Simultaneously, they recognized that if they could see the higher-quality manufactured goods in made in Europe to people living in other countries then they could make a much larger profit than when trade was limited to just the domestic market.

A big part of the liberal revolutions that swept Europe and the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries was aimed at breaking down these trade barriers. This isn’t to say that all tariffs and import restrictions disappeared. They never did. But they were massively reduced and it became the global standard to preference a reduction in duties unless there was some extenuating circumstance why you shouldn’t. Economic hardships like depressions tended to see a rise in economic protectionism as blaming foreign industry for your own economy failing was an easy scapegoat.

The push away from free trade came in the early 20th century along with the rise in competing world ideologies. It had always been the case that even free-trade focused nations (the US and UK being the biggest historical examples) would limit trade with countries they were at war with or expected to be at war with soon. In the run up to WW1 there was a lot of restrictions in trade between, for example, France and Germany as the two countries fully expected to be at war at some point. Then, with the rise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, communist nations tried to fully block all trade with capitalist nations, and vice versa. This was driven not only by economic concerns, but primarily by ideological concerns. Cold War propaganda (on both sides) preached about how inferior the other side was and how terrible life was for people on the other side. Trade had a huge potential to put the lie to that propaganda, so it was restricted.

So, to summarize my this long rambling post, for most of “civilized” human history, what we’re calling trade war today was just the standard. International trade existed, but was limited as much as possible wherever possible. After the liberal revolutions made free trade the global standard, trade wars as the discrete events we think of now became possible. They pretty much always looked like what we’re seeing now with the US and Canada. One side slaps a tariff or restriction on trade from the other side. That other side does a similar reciprocal action in return. The first side does another action in retaliation to that retaliation. Etc etc.

Not too different from how they’re waged today. One country tells all their partners “If you keep buying stuff from my enemy, I will not buy any of your stuff, or sell you this super important thing you need!”

The difference is probably that high seas piracy was more common “back in the day”